What are the catalysts for the next bull market in the currency circle?

In yesterday’s article, I mentioned that there is a big difference between the current market round and the one in 2017, that is, so far, we have not found any events similar to the ICO in 2017.

If there is no event other than halving to stimulate the market, the halving of Bitcoin alone cannot create a big miracle. The stories that Bitcoin itself can tell are already very limited, and the future of the blockchain is determined by certain technologies and applications that create value for society.

I once mentioned three major events worth looking forward to in the currency circle in 2020. In addition to the Bitcoin halving, the other two are the launch of the Filecoin mainnet and the launch of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain.

So are these two things likely to be the trigger for another miracle?

Let's first look at the launch of the Filecoin mainnet.

In the second half of last year, I wrote a series of articles introducing Filecoin. From the perspective of the technical strength of the project team, investment institutions, and the field of distributed storage, it is a project worth looking forward to, but the biggest problem is that the project is difficult and there are technical risks.

At present, Filecoin's test network has been launched and its operation is stable. However, due to the impact of the epidemic, the date of the second phase of the test network and the launch of the main network have been postponed again, and this time the delay is as long as 2 months. The final launch of the main network The date is probably around July this year.

If Filecoin can be launched on time this time, it is possible to bring some hot spots by virtue of the influence of the project itself. Because there are many stakeholders involved in this project, almost including many top institutions and project teams in the US technology, limelight and blockchain industries, as well as many leading teams and many investors in the domestic storage field. Once the project is launched, the promotion and promotion of the project will become an emerging hot spot in the blockchain field.

Let's look at Ethereum 2.0 again.

In my opinion, Ethereum 2.0 is not only related to the future of Ethereum itself, but also to the future of the entire blockchain development.The fundamental reason why the blockchain did not create another miracle after the ICO in 2017 is that the public chain technology itself has been unable to break through technical limitations to carry more and more complex applications.

In the current public chain ecology, the most attention-getting thing is Ethereum, because there are two more eye-catching directions in the current ecology of Ethereum,One is decentralized finance DeFi, and the other is decentralized autonomous organization DAO.

The reason why these two directions are eye-catching is not because they have already generated huge value, but because the mode of their operation has given the industry hope for new scenarios that the blockchain may produce in the future.

However, hope alone is far from enough. If this kind of hope cannot be realized into real value, it is just a castle in the air, with lip service but no benefits.

DeFi and DAO have made great progress and amazing achievements in the past two years or so, but they can only be used in small circles, and cannot become applications that the general public can feel. Why?

I think the root cause is the technical limitations of Ethereum itself, which greatly limits the application and value output of these ecosystems.

so far,

so far,Among all public chain projects, only Ethereum 2.0 is likely to solve this problem well.

Only after Ethereum 2.0 is fully launched can the blockchain as a whole enter a higher level. Only on this higher-level platform can various applications fully express their performance and output their value.

We might as well recall ICO, as early as 2013, before the birth of Ethereum, there was ICO. But why didn't it become popular until 2016, and reached its climax in 2017? Not because of the ICO itself, but because before the emergence of Ethereum, its performance and advantages could not be brought into play through suitable technology, so it could only be popular in small circles.

When Ethereum's smart contracts and ERC-20 token standards appeared, people were surprised to find that using these two technologies, the ICO model can allow investors to participate in investment without threshold in just a few minutes. And the speed kills all existing investment models.

The maturity of the Ethereum smart contract and ERC-20 token standards took place in 2016. This fixed the starting time of ICO boom in 2016.

Therefore, without a suitable technical platform, no matter how good the application model is, it will be empty talk.

so in my opinionThe next "super application" is likely to have appeared, but due to the immaturity of the existing technology, it cannot show its own advantages. What it is looking forward to is a stage where it can really play its role, and this stage is Ethereum 2.0.

So when will Ethereum 2.0 be fully launched? According to the current plan, it may be difficult to be earlier than 2022, 2023. Regardless of whether it is 2022 or 2023, this time point is actually closer to the next Bitcoin halving time point in 2024. This has paved the way for another halving in 4 years.

In summary, my views on this market are as follows:

1) If the Filecoin mainnet cannot be launched on time again, this halving will be just a small round of market. It is conservatively estimated that the high level that Bitcoin can reach is between US$20,000 and US$50,000.

2) If the Filecoin mainnet can be launched on time in July and there are no major technical problems, the current round of halving can be expected, and the price that Bitcoin can reach will be very imaginative.

I think there is another market worth looking forward to that may appear around 2024, because Ethereum 2.0 will make its debut at that time, and we are likely to see a more disruptive application than ICO.